By Valerie Strauss
Here is the text of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s speech delivered at the 2013 convention of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, being held this week in Washington D.C....
...When I spoke at your national conference four years ago, (click here) the first CREDO study had been released just days beforehand. At the time, the charter movement was on the defensive. Four years later, the picture is brighter.
CREDO’s new study, released just last week, shows a significant improvement in charter quality from 2009 to 2013. And charters have especially boosted learning for black students in poverty and Hispanic English language learners.
Compared to similar peers in traditional public schools, low-income black students at charter schools gain an additional 29 days of learning in reading and 36 days in math per year.
That is a meaningful impact. And Hispanic ELL students make even bigger gains—50 days of learning, or 10 weeks, in reading, and 43 days of learning in math.
The CREDO study also shows that charters in several cities and a number of states are far out-performing comparable traditional public schools.
In Rhode Island, charter students gain 86 extra days of learning in reading compared to their traditional public school counterparts, and a staggering 108 extra days of learning in math.
In D.C., students in charter schools gain about 70 to 100 extra days of learning a year—and charter students in Tennessee and Louisiana also had huge gains.
Yet like so many studies of charter schools, the CREDO analysis tells a good news-bad news story. It shows enormous variation in performance.
We know that state policy and authorizing policies matter — and they matter a great deal to charter quality for children. States that were not careful about authorizing charters and let weak operators remain open year after year have a lot of low-quality charters. There are too many charters where students actually learn less than their counterparts in traditional public schools.
On average, charter students in Pennsylvania, Oregon, Texas, Arizona, Arkansas, and Ohio lose a month to two months in learning each school year. Nevada is even worse — charter students lose more than 100 days of learning a year.
If there is a silver lining in the poor record of these states and authorizers, it is that lawmakers are now reforming state regulation and laws to improve charter quality and make charters more accountable.
And charter authorizers nationwide are moving more rapidly to close bad schools. This spring, Nevada and Texas passed strong laws on authorizing charter schools for the first time — including an automatic closure provision for failing charters. Ohio implemented a similar law starting in 2008, and tightened its accountability and default closure provisions in 2011....
